Free In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault

which is right?” I asked.
    “Boys aren’t pigs or werewolves,” Charlotte said, curling her lip at us in disgust. “That’s discrimination. ”
    “Fine, Charlotte,” Rose snapped. “ People are pigs. People are werewolves. People in general are awful, disgusting, shitty animals.”
    Charlotte’s mouth hung open for a moment, but she quickly recovered. She seemed too rattled to bother to scold Rose for her language. A moment later she went back to fashioning her little Puritan people.
    I bit my nails for a couple of minutes, bored but not wanting to bother Rose or help Charlotte with her A-plus diorama. Then I rummaged through Charlotte’s box of black books till I found the one with my favorite picture—of seven fat, squat statues standing in a row on Easter Island. They all had flat, squarish heads and no mouths. I loved this picture, and I loved those statues. They were so mysterious, but so peaceful, too. They surely guarded a very old secret. What was it? I felt I could look at them for a long, long time and not need anything else to keep me busy. Not TV, not music, not Charlotte’s chatter about what they might mean. As far as I knew, Charlotte had only flipped through this book once and then tossed it aside in favor of the ones about psychics and ghosts. But I’d spent a little longer on it, and I knew that if you sat with them and stayed as quiet as they were, you could start to feel you might understand them, just a tiny bit. If you stared at them long enough, you started to smile without knowing why. I knew that Charlotte had never looked at them long enough to know this, and I wasn’t going to tell her.

Chapter Five
    May 22, 2006
    When I woke up, it was past nine. Charlotte had been gone for several hours. She’d probably discussed the symbolism of The Scarlet Letter a few times before I’d even gotten up. I imagined a class full of fourteen-year-olds: some pimply, some obnoxious, some sweet, one with hair in her eyes, and one chewing gum with a self-satisfied smirk. The only unsettling thing about this picture was that I couldn’t imagine Charlotte in it.
    But that’s where she was. And it was just starting to dawn on me that I’d no idea what I was going to do all day—for several days—without her. I’d start with going out for coffee. I threw on some jeans and a peasant top and scuffed into my clogs. Before heading out, I grabbed the typed page off the coffee table, folded it, and shoved it into the back pocket of my jeans. I didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but I felt that Charlotte had, in good teacher fashion, left me something to do.
    I parked at the Dunkin’ Donuts next to Deans’ Auto Body. After I got my coffee, I sat in a booth sipping, watching cars roll through the intersection, wondering if any of them were driven by people I used to know.
    It was in this very Dunkin’ Donuts that Charlotte and I had last talked right before I left town. I’d been slightly surprised when she’d invited me out for coffee a couple of weeks after we graduated high school.
    Charlotte had dumped a few tablespoons of sugar into her cup, but I took my coffee black.
    “You really like it that way?” she’d asked, watching me skeptically as I took my first sip.
    “Yeah. I like bitter-tasting things, actually,” I explained.
    “Hmm. So… Syracuse, huh? You excited?”
    “Yup,” I said.
    “Kind of a party school. I was surprised when I heard where you were going.”
    “It also has a pretty good arts program.”
    Charlotte nodded. She was going to the University of Connecticut—about twenty minutes away from Waverly. She’d gotten a near-full scholarship that was offered statewide to kids with high test scores and grades in the top 10 percent of their class.
    “You get good financial aid?” Charlotte wanted to know.
    “Really good,” I said. My mother and I looked relatively poor on paper.
    Before we’d finished our coffees, Charlotte had brought up Rose.
    “You sure liked her,